Feels like a holiday, but maybe one that’s gone a bit off the rails…
Everyone’s home most of the day now because we’re in the midst of Ohio’s coronavirus-induced stay-at-home order. We’re spread out across 3 floors. College classes occur on the second floor, high school on the first. I’m working mostly from a desk in the finished part of our basement. It’s not a holiday, even though sometimes it feels like one given these strangely unstructured days.
Just like The House Always Needs Cleaning Even Though The Kids Don’t Think It’s Messy, this is a Fibonacci poem, or Fib. In this form, the number of syllables per line increases (or decreases) following the Fibonacci Sequence, which is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…
When I wrote this short poem, I was thinking about how dramatically different our shopping is when everyone is home. And not just home part of the day but all day. For instance, we’re going through an awful lot of milk. Don’t even get me started on snack foods. Or bananas. The teen boy might not be a monkey, but he’s eating like one.
Until this stay-at-home order and the related crisis that kept our daughter from returning to college after Spring Break, this volume of grocery shopping was only needed for the big holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. And I would have to be “in the mood” to make the big run. As an introvert, when I get finished with a day of work, mostly I don’t want to see any other human beings. Now that I’m working a (significant) distance from others, and mostly see people on a computer screen, I want to get out, go to the grocery store or some other place outside my house, as soon as my last video-call finishes!
Even Introverts Need to Get Out
Closed
down
cafes,
bars, restaurants, spas.
The pizza place still delivers.
Fast food joints go drive-thru only, eat-ins start take-out.
Odd for an introvert: I want to grocery shop, though I need nothing. Except milk?
Two teens home all day drink a lot of milk. I forgot
how much rice we eat. Before, this
was a holiday
thing: big carts
flowing
with
food.
Of course, when shopping for Thanksgiving meals, I hardly ever stuff my cart with paper towels, cleaning chemicals, or toilet paper. Actually, we’re doing OK on toilet paper, I think. Cleaning chemicals are another whole story because, really, how do you know they are working? Don’t get me going on that topic!
Don’t believe me that the Fib is a “real” form? You can read other poets’ Fibonacci poems in the online journal, The Fib Review.
Missed a poem? Links to prior poems can be found on this page.
Need something from the store? I’d be happy to run out…today I downloaded a restaurant app so we could order lunch on line. Then we parked outside the restaurant and someone brought the order out to use.
(Not real berries from my salad, but similar.)